Side Effects Review (PC)

Side Effects of roulette include one of the following: a combination of utter disgust and disbelief, confusion or pure, unadulterated rage. The sad reality here, however, is that you’ll wind up experiencing the full extent of said effects after one shot from the cocktail of narcotics — especially if they’re prescribed by a beady-eyed patient with a prolapsed vertebrae and a sinister smile that makes your bones shudder.

Perhaps I’m on of the lucky ones, because I don’t have to spend eight minutes slugging bullets and dodging the dreary hand of fate. No, in this bunker of pills and questionable narcotics, I have the luxury of being able to stare death in the eye and waltz away at the end of it all, safe in the knowledge that the pharmaceutical vaccine that stands before me should, and probably will remediate the problem. A handful of pills; a table of desperate souls; and a small paycheck waiting in the mail. Oh, I fancy my odds a lot more than those who sit adjacent to the table. Maybe it’s a self-inflated ego talking, or maybe, just maybe, it’s the self-inflicted “high” that I’ve gifted myself after several rounds of “meditation.”

With hindsight, I probably should have opted for a different pill. Sadly, it wasn’t the case of red or blue; it was a multitude of drugs—a conveyor belt of pills that, frankly, were so poorly labeled that I might as well have been reading hieroglyphics from a coaster. And in this game, one mistake can culminate in a rather grizzly fate. There’s confidence in the room, for sure. Yet, I’m starting to believe that the placebo effect has taken hold of us all, and that we’re all floating on cloud nine with a knife wedged firmly in our backs.

To tell you the truth, I’m starting to wonder why I ever pictured this as being a good idea. For the record, it’s not — yet I’m in too deep, and I still have the toughest pill to swallow. There are three other players in the room, and there are still a handful of questionable undesirables to consume. I think that one patient is selling himself short, and I think that the other two are too caught up in the hallucinatory process to come to grips with the situation. And for me? I think I’m just glad to be alive after that previous concoction.

Bottoms Up

Side Effects is, for those who’ve yet to dig into their own branch of research, is a single-player and four-player co-op game that forces you to wage medical warfare across the table in short high-stakes rounds of roulette. The caveat here is that, where you would typically have a revolver to keep you company over the duration of the battle, in Side Effects you have pills and other pharmaceutical treatments. The idea, however, still remains the same: players take turns choosing pills, several of which apply buffs and stat-boosting effects that bolster your tolerance, and some of which pulverize your immune system and force you to enter fight or flight mode.

Like roulette, Side Effects pits up to four players against one another in an attempt to find one survivor—a patient who can untimely lie, cheat, and shift the hand of fate in their favor. There’s a lot of dumb luck involved, and sure enough, there are tons of choices to make, with each decision having a consequence, be it a matter of claiming boosters that remediate your rapidly deteriorating tolerance meter, or sourcing fresh ways to help it dwindle into a pittance. The goal, though, is as simple as you might expect: pick pills at random, and hope that the side effects aren’t quite as severe as the others on the docket. Simple, yet oh-so difficult to, you know, win.

The bad news to all of the above is that, if you are playing in the single-player mode with bots, then your chances of survival are slim to nonexistent. Although billed as a roulette game—a game that leans heavily towards chance—the bots in Side Effects annoyingly have the gift of clairvoyance to guide them. What I mean to say here is that, despite there being no label or veil to help you understand your drug of choice, the bots do, frustratingly, have a natural tendency to always select the correct pills. In other words, if you want to jump into a fair game as a lone wolf, then you might as well hang fire until several of these teething issues have been knocked out with a stone hammer.

A Cocktail of Pills

The good news is that, as a multiplayer game at heart, Side Effects delivers exactly what it says on the tin: a fast-paced, albeit slightly grotesque co-op affair that waxes tense gameplay with quick-fire scandals that have the potential to turn even the unluckiest players into scheming patients with a knack for choking on success. Again, the idea is simple, yet Side Effects does a pretty great job of making each round feel like a nail-biting ordeal, with thanks to its pharmaceutical properties and tide-shifting mechanics. It’s still a game about aimlessly choosing pills and balancing tolerance, true — but there is, however, a lot of depth rooted in the process, weirdly.

The audiovisual aspects are a tad unorthodox and, in some cases, deeply disturbing. Granted, Side Effects doesn’t do anything special to reinvent the palette of roulette-like doppelgängers, but it does envelope a SCP-like foundation, which is, for what it’s worth, a solid source to work with. Of course, doesn’t deliver the wow factor, but it does enough to add a few hairs to the chest, so to speak.

Sadly, there are a few technical and graphical bugs that dampen Side Effects’ performance. For example, pills often disappear, and prompts often inform you to make an action that you simply cannot execute, i.e to take an item that doesn’t exist. These are minor issues that could, of course, be addressed in the near future. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that, at least in its current incarnation, there are several loose teeth that could do with a bit of tightening.

Verdict

Side Effects rustles up a drug-fueled cocktail of pills and questionable pharmaceutical remedies in a quick-fire, morbidly bizarre co-op affair that feels both dull and oddly addictive at the same time. There’s a good balance here, with several great in-game elements and mid-round twists to keep you emotionally invested for a lot longer than the queue at a local ER waiting room. Is it a perfect roulette-like game? No. However, this is a different kind of experience that brings a great deal of fresh layers to the table, albeit a slightly darker set of layers, unsurprisingly.

Suffice it to say, Side Effects doesn’t get everything right, nor does it exactly waltz out from beneath the woodwork with a handful of mesmerizing audiovisual elements, for that matter. It has bugs, and it has a lot of teething issues that, frankly, could do with a little extra time in the oven. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it has the potential to become a fantastic drug-addled multiplayer game. It’s weird, eccentric, and honestly, an surprisingly fun way to spend a few hours between harder narcotics à la Souls-like RPGs. Take from that what you will, I guess.